Negativity swirls over Galveston as House race heads to wire

1of2Former state district judge Susan Criss is running as a Democrat to succeed longtime state Rep. Craig Eiland, whose district includes Galveston and Chamber counties.Photo: Handout

2of2Wayne Faircloth, a State Farm insurance agent, is running as a Republican to succeed longtime state Rep. Craig Eiland, whose district includes Galveston and Chamber counties.Photo: Handout

GALVESTON - It is hard to find a yard here free of a sign supporting Wayne Faircloth or Susan Criss. And it is hard to find a television channel here free of an ad bashing them.

The race for state representative for House District 23 has turned from expensive and quiet to expensive and ugly as one of Texas' tightest elections heads down to the wire.

Thanks to a deluge of negative television advertisements purchased in the past month, the battle has devolved into a bout of name-calling as both campaigns seek to define their opponent by the industry that has backed them financially.

To hear Criss tell it, Faircloth is an insurance salesman who profited from others' misfortunes when Hurricane Ike struck the barrier island.

Faircloth says Criss is a trial lawyer's best friend who looks out for them and her potential constituents second.

"People say this is the ugly side of politics," Faircloth said Monday at his campaign headquarters, where Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Greg Abbott's wife, Cecilia, visited to help get out the vote. "It's why good people do not run - because why would you sign up for this?"

The district, centered in Galveston and including all of Chambers County, voted for Republican Mitt Romney and Democratic Rep. Craig Eiland in 2012, but Eiland's retirement this year has created an open seat that Texas Democrats and Republicans regard as one of the most competitive races this fall.

Money has poured into Galveston as the race has heated up, with both campaigns on Tuesday announcing outsized fundraising hauls that have amplified their negative messages since late September.

Criss said that in the past month she had raised $212,000 and had spent $300,000 on television airtime.

Faircloth more than doubled Criss' haul, raising $576,000, including $190,000 of in-kind contributions from the Associated Republicans of Texas and $225,000 from Texans for Lawsuit Reform.

Texas lawyers

An overwhelming majority of Criss' money has come from Texas lawyers, including large donations from Democratic mega-donors Steve and Amber Mostyn and groups affiliated with them.

Those groups donated $75,000 to Criss between Sep. 26 and Oct. 25, the latest filings show, and contributed more than $200,000 during the previous period.

Those donations are drawing the condemnation of Faircloth.

Despite initially saying he would not call Criss a "trial lawyer" and focusing his first spot on defending his biography from the Criss onslaught, Faircloth is blasting her in a series of mailers and television spots as wedded to the Mostyns and the state's plaintiff lawyers.

Over the weekend, the negativity escalated as Faircloth supporters held a rally near a Galveston County polling place where they threw darts at photos of Criss and other Democratic candidates.

The Faircloth campaign said it did not condone the event, and the Young Republicans of Galveston County, which organized the event, apologized.

Criss said Monday at her law office that she was outraged by the incident and by the campaign's broader tone.

Her media campaign, however, has been negative from the beginning, arguing in both of her television advertisements that Faircloth's reluctance to honor payouts after Ike exacerbated the hurricane's toll for Gulf Coast families.

Neither campaign is claiming responsibility for the negative tenor, though both acknowledge it has defined the close race's closing weeks.

The candidates' surrogates and biggest backers say they deplore the back-and-forth but concede that the negativity is not unexpected given this race's competitiveness.

"This is a period during campaigns when you just have to hold your nose and pray for Election Day," Cornyn said.

Mostyn said the negativity may be "unfortunate" but it works - generally.

"I think it can get to the point where it turns off both sides," he said.

Teddy Schleifer covers local politics for the Chronicle, reporting on Houston elections, political strategies and voter demographics in one of the best political news towns in the country.

Teddy previously interned at The New York Times' Washington D.C. bureau and at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He spent his college years at Princeton University, where he edited the news section of The Daily Princetonian and broke the news that David Petraeus was interested in the school's presidency (Paula Broadwell was a source.) Teddy's senior thesis, which empirically tested whether presidential rhetoric made an impact with certain types of voters, won the Lyman H. Atwater Prize as the best thesis in the Politics Department.